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By Mom Unplugged, March 6, 2011 4:35 pm

If you have milk, food coloring and dish washing soap on hand…

you can have impressive rainy-day science fun!

Pour some milk into a plate:

Wait a minute for any motion in the milk to settle down, then add four drops of different colors of food coloring. Place the drops next to each other near the center of the plate.

Wait a minute or so until the colors get a bit blotchy-looking:

Take a clean cotton swab and gently place it on the colors. What do you think will happen?

(SPOILER ALERT: Absolutely nothing.)

Now put a drop of dish soap onto the other, clean and dry end of your swab.

What will happen when you put the soapy swab gently onto the colors? Look!

It even continues impressively swirling and churning after you have lifted the swab out of the milk!

Try putting your swab in different areas of the plate to see what new patterns form.

NOTE: It is very important not to stir, just hold your swab still in the milk.

Make sure you have plenty of milk and food coloring on hand for this because your kids won’t want to do it just one time. This kept my 5 year-old entertained for at least an hour!

Many thanks to Steve Spangler’s Science Experiments for this really fun idea! Steve Spangler has a good explanation of the science behind this colorful display. You can read it here.

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This is my contribution to this month’s Unplugged Project theme of soap. Can you come up with a soap-themed project? If so, please join in and add a link or comment to the original project post. You can read more about the Unplugged Project here!

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By Mom Unplugged, January 8, 2011 11:21 am

More than 600 teens from a high school in Washington State recently conducted an experiment in which they quit social media-use and texting for one week. Thanks to teacher Trent Mitchell who came up with this “Social Experiment” (Theme: “What was life like in 1995?”), kids learned to communicate the “old-fashioned” way: by calling friends and parents on the phone and actually speaking. Many of the teens had never spoken to friends on the phone before, and found that their friends were awkward conversationalists:

But [Cole Sweeten, 17] likes getting calls. He prefers a real “Hey, how are you?” to a “Hello” text with a smiley face. “People sound different when they’re on the phone,” he said. “It’s emotion, not just little lines.”

Another teen, Eimanne El Zein, 17, reported that it felt “weird” giving it up, but that each day got easier and she was able to take more time for exercise, like running with her dogs, something she never had time to do when Facebook was in her life.

Advice from 16 year-old Nicholi Wytovicz:

…activities such as shooting hoops or watching basketball are better distractions than ones that take 10 or 15 minutes, he said. “Do something that fills time in large segments,” he advised.